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This year, I’ll be dipping my toes more wholesomely into other platforms and seeing what life is like on ‘the other side’.
Clearly, this means spending more time with Windows. It’s why I bought a Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 last year and why I accepted a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Carbon (I think that’s what it’s called – the name goes on forever) review unit.
I have quite a history with Windows. Throughout my teens, I geeked out by building my own computers, overclocking graphics cards, and attempting to squeeze every last MHz out of badly installed Pentiums. Occasionally I’d play games on those machines and actually use them, but that was rare.
From memory, my Windows experience was 10% enjoyment, and 90% pull-your-teeth-out frustrating.
Fast-forward twenty years, and nothing has changed.
“Mark… the laptop isn’t working”
My girlfriend has zero interest in technology. She has the same relationship with it that I have with our toaster; it just needs to work.
That’s why I gave her the Surface Laptop 4 to use for a study project. She’s used to Windows at work, you see, therefore any time spent on my behalf trying to reveal the virtues of macOS and my wonderful M1 MacBook Air would be wasted.
Everything was going fine until one fateful evening.
“Mark… the laptop isn’t working.”
Those immortal words activated something I’d buried deeply at the back of my mind. I knew this cry for help related to a Windows laptop, and it had been a good two decades since I’d had to deal with any issues on that platform.
I thought the trials and tribulations of those depressing PC-building days were behind me. I’ll never see or have to deal with another blue screen ever again, I thought. Safe Mode, the BIOS, and command prompts were all things of the past. Weird, entirely stupid, and biblically nonsensical technical issues would never again darken the doorstep of my happiness.
Right?
Nope.
We’re back at square one, Dorothy.
My attempts to fix it
It was bad. I knew that from the moment Jen told me she’d been working happily on a Word document only for the Surface Laptop 4 to shut itself down without warning.
Now, it wouldn’t boot up. It would try, don’t get me wrong, but after a brief display of the Windows logo, the laptop would bong and return to a black screen. Left plugged in, it would do this for the rest of time.
I calmed myself and collected my thoughts. It’s going to be ok, I uttered under my breath. You can do this, Mark.
Safe Mode, I thought. That used to be a thing – perhaps it still is.
Well, kinda. But the more immediate issue was getting into the Surface Laptop’s repair options screen. You have to conduct a needlessly complicated and precise Morse code-style power button sequence to access the boot options. It literally took me about 43 attempts.
Eventually, I was presented with a bunch of options on that horribly familiar blue screen. I could boot from a USB, internal storage, or a PXE network.
There were three issues here:
- I didn’t have a USB stick to hand, nor did I have any idea what to put on it;
- the only internal storage available was the laptop’s SSD, which didn’t want to boot into Windows; and
- I had absolutely no idea what a PXE network was.
There were some other options, thankfully. Under the ‘Troubleshoot’ menu, I found ‘Reset this PC’. Nice. From the looks of it, I could choose to keep my files and simply reset the operating system, or remove everything and start from scratch.
Finally – a light at the end of the tunnel.
After clicking the ‘reset everything’ button, I was given the option to undertake a cloud download of Windows or conduct a local reinstall. Knowing that the latter would throw me back into PXE network territory, I opted for the cloud.
That didn’t work. Obviously.
“Try the local reinstall option,” said the laptop, unhelpfully.
Heading back into the troubleshooting menu and with my patience rapidly diminishing, I noticed an ‘Advanced’ button. Clicking that gave me six options:
- Start-up repair
- Start-up settings
- Command prompt
- Uninstall updates
- UEFI firmware settings
- System restore
They all sound pretty interesting, right? Promising, even.
None of them worked. Obviously.
Actually, I tell a lie – both command prompt and UEFI firmware settings did work, but left me with two additional problems to add to the growing pile of blue screen-inflicted horridness:
- I had no idea what to do once presented with the command prompt; and
- I had no idea what to do in the UEFI firmware settings screen.
Put simply, this laptop was ‘borked’, as the kids say. That endless boot loop appeared to be entirely unfixable unless I could locate a USB drive containing Windows.
This all feels rather familiar
Clearly, my Surface Laptop can be fixed. Indeed, since that fateful day a few weeks back, I have discovered how to create a USB Windows recovery disk and now simply need to find the time, energy, and desire to get it up and running again.
But the time spent in that miserable blue screen – and, of course, the reason for having to enter it in the first place – chucked me twenty years into the past.
Nothing has changed. If something goes inexplicably wrong with a Windows computer, you enter a world of hell when trying to fix it.
Tech lingo (why am I expected to know what ‘UEFI’ means?) and seemingly useful buttons that only result in meaningless error messages don’t make for a great DIY fix experience.
I don’t think anything is hideously wrong with my Surface Laptop. I’m pretty confident that Windows simply needs reinstalling. That’s fine – these things happen. But why is it so damn hard to just reinstall the damn operating system?
This is made all the more frustrating when you consider that the problem resides on a Windows laptop that’s made by Microsoft. Surely that should give it the best chance of success?
By comparison, my Macs (all five of them) are… well, actually (and I know this is tempting fate), they never do anything remotely like this. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I needed to reinstall or reset macOS. It just doesn’t happen.
There was, however, one option left for my Surface Laptop which didn’t involve any Windows shenanigans.
Let’s turn it into a Chromebook!
During the latest episode of Eight or Sixteen, my co-host Rob suggested that I could turn the nearly-deceased Surface Laptop 4 into a Chromebook.
This can be done via Google’s brilliant Chrome OS Flex project, which is designed to turn old PCs and Macs into Chromebooks.
You do this by downloading an installer to a USB stick, inserting it into your old laptop, and watching as Chrome OS magically appears on the screen. Then, if it all works as expected and you enjoy the experience, you can choose to install Chrome OS permanently.
I found this extremely exciting.
The Chrome OS Flex installer didn’t work on my Surface Laptop 4. Obviously.
My future with Windows
I haven’t given up on Windows; I’m going to stick with my strategy of broadening my horizons this year, I promise.
But as soon as the next Windows laptop I’m using blue screens, boot loops, or bongs at me, I’m going to install Chrome OS on it. Immediately. If it works, obviously. Which it probably won’t.
Oh, and if you’re interested, my girlfriend is now happily using the M1 MacBook Air.
14 Comments
Thats why I stopped using Window/PC 25 years ago. Not saying here haven’t been problems with Mac, OS 9 was a doosey, X brought its own set of issues but they have been sorted and can’t remember when I had that sort of full blown crash. Doesn’t give me the slightest inclination to move to Windows. Happy in my little Apple Fan Boy World.
I also used to build my own PCs for gaming. Loved the gaming part, hated the issues dealing with driver issues or other OS related crashes. I don’t recall the process being difficult (but this was back when you have a cd or dvd with the OS on it) but the fact you had to do it and it would take almost a day by the time you got everything up and running again. I also remember it was good practice to do a fresh install of windows every year to keep things running smoothly and at peak performance. Crazy! 12 years on Mac and the only time I had to troubleshot something was because of a dead HDD. I did do a reinstall once just to see what the process was like…
By way of analogy, Android phones are the same. And the greatest irritation is that everyone is battling via contacts databases and browsers to own your data to exploit for mooney. Yes google, Microsoft and Samsung, I’m looking at you! I lasted 2 months on a Samsung before returning to the ease and comfort of small ville Apple. Thank god..
This is why I will only use Windows on a company issued computer with an IT department to fix what goes wrong. For personal use, I only use Macs.
This review was amusing, well paced, and it had a decent and relatable punchline ending.
NOICE, as the kids say.
Cheers!
Another reason to hate Microsoft: You know those amazing photographs you get on the sign in page? See one that you really love? Want it to go away? Easy. Just click on the upper right screen and tell them that you like it. It will disappear like magic!
I don’t hate Windows, but I have reason to.
STILL no file paths longer than 260 characters in Windows Explorer, in 2023? It’s a kind of Windows 3.0 problem and still exist! How to force Microsoft to fix it? https://superuser.com/questions/1783364/still-no-file-paths-longer-than-260-characters-in-win-explorer-in-2023
Boot options and such stuff has NOTHING to do with windows. The UEFI of a computer is software integrated into the hardware by the hardware producer. Thats why different computer mainboards have different UEFIs.
UEFI is loaded before windows is even started.
Windows is not standardized unlike macOS. Windows is an open system. MacOS is not an open system. Apple has standardized their products. So they all function the exact same way.
Because windows is an open system it allows customization. Thats why different products using windows dont work in exactly the same way.
That is intended because thats what defines windows as an open system.
Reading what u have written I can see you draw false conclusions. You conclude that all the difficulties u have with windows happen because windows is so bad and thats why you hate it.
But actually the difficulties you have are not caused by windows. They happen because you obviously lack knowledge about how to use windows systems. What u wrote is a list of things you dont understand.
You wrote “[…]meaningless error messages don’t make for a great DIY fix experience.”
They are not meaningless. You simply dont see any meaning in it because you dont understand it.
What you understand or dont understand decides if you see a meaning or not. That idoesnt have to do with windows because if something has a meaning or not to you is the result of the processes in your brain. If things have a meaning or not is something you attach to things outside your body.
Physically “meaning” does not exist and its not possible to measure or provide evidence for the existence of “meaning” outside your body. Meaning only exists as a thought.
The way it looks to me your negative “DIY fix experience” is happening because you lack understanding of many things.
If you want a good DIY fix experience it depends on knowing what you are doing. Your text clearly shows you dont know what you are doing well. So logically the DIY fix experience can only be as good as your understanding of what you are doing.
Also you never considered if maybe all this complicated stuff is intentional. Companies want to sell their product. In theory you could use a computer device for a decade. But that also means your next purchase of a computer would be in a decade.
To take control over customers buying behaviour companies intentionally use hardware parts that fail after a few years. So people buy a new computer every few years instead of a decade or more.
Its just like any smartphone today is so powerful that there isnt really a reason to buy a new smartphone. Newly released smartphones are objectively always only a tiny bit better than the previous models. And the way you use a new smartphone is normally just the exact same one you always use with any phone.
So there is no reason to buy a new smartphone regularly. But companies want u to do that. So they always present new products in a way thats supposed to manipulate your feelings and thus your judgement. So u have the feeling “I really have to buy this new product”. Judging things by feelings is always inaccurate and leads to false conclusions.
Obviously you feel really bad because u used the word “hate”. You project how you feel onto the windows product. You regard it as the source of your negative feelings.
Why do you project this? Because what u feel is uncomfortable and you want to get rid of it.
They feel uncomfortable because what you experience shows you dont know what u are doing. Means you lack an ability. People in general dont like to face their own limits and accept they lack abilities.
So people project. It is a defense mechanism because the thought that it could be that you simply have no idea what you are doing is way more uncomfortable than blaming something outside of you for how you feel. Its much easier too to blame anything but oneself.
If you were aware of the psychology behind your judgements you would have noticed that the thing that makes the most sense is to simply learn how to use windows computers properly. This way you would have had a positive experience.
Sadly you took the easy way and decided to hate windows.
So you deny yourself the chance to gain the knowledge of how to use windows computers.
The result of your behaviour is not only that you have the negative feeling of hating windows. The result is also that you assure yourself you arent able to make a different experience with windows computers. So you assure yourself you will always be the guy that makes a meaningless DIY fix experience with windows computers.
Your essay leaves me with one feeling: “Windows seems hard to use, even with a windows built device… I hate windows”
Trust Me, Windows will make Our Brain so BreakDown & Hard to Use.
For Example : They Always Forced Users to update everything even it’s Unnecessary things. We Must To follow All They Ambition.
But, Fun Fact And Make me Happy : Just Press the Enter Button, my rocket will Go Launch.
I’ve been using Windows since Windows 98. I went to my local chain store back in 1998 and proudly came home with a tower, a monitor, a keyboard, a printer and a mouse. I thought I was the bee’s knees. And I also rocked a powerful 56k modem. No-one was messing with me.
But Windows 98 also came with a lot of problems. I wish I’d known about drive-imaging programs back then. That said, did they even exist back then? Especially user-friendly ones?
My favourite version of Windows was Windows XP SP3. It seemed pretty well designed and solid to me. I wish MS had stuck with that and continued to upgrade it over the years. But no. That said, I wish it (and ALL subsequent) Windows variants had come with built-in drive-imaging back-up capability. (That said, ALL operating systems would benefit from such capability imo.)
My favourite Windows screw-up was the inability of Windows to run software that it itself created. Windows XP couldn’t install the Microsoft Encarta Reference Suite (2001). Go figure.
And in a similar vein, Windows 10 won’t install some of my software that installs on XP.
Great post, I too hate Windows but am required to use it extensively at work. Turns out Finder restarts the entire search when you try to sort the results. Oh Microsoft…. My personal Macbook air from 2011 still works great and reinstalling the operating system is a breeze (no USB required).
Windows is a cancer, Linux is the cure…
In the same machine I have Linux kubuntu with the plasma desktop installed on a m.2 hard drive. I also have windows 10 installed on a different M.2 drive. To keep things simple I switch between the two systems threw the PC’s bios menu.. Windows is only used to play GTA online and everything else has been striped out of windows… No Microsoft accounts or any other accounts, no other apps or crap ware… Nothing else except the stuff needed to play my games.
Linux no longer requires you to use the command line interface and it can be used just as easily as windows and there are better alternatives in software than what windows has to offer. Linux is built by people who like computers and want to help to build a better world…, its not all about profit like Microsoft and Google. I honestly can’t see why people wont invest the time to get familiar and how to use the best, most security hardened, open source (free) operating system known to man. The source code that sent man to the moon and runs your appliances, bank machines, the internet, etc is based on Linux. Apples ISO and Googles Android are also Linux under the hood.
Linux scares people because they think you need a degree in computer sciences to use it, you don’t. Linux is used by computer geeks because it is simply the best, most reliable operating system period.
Do yourself a big favour, get away from Microsoft and liberate your computer and your data with Linux.